COLLINGWOOD has sought advice from outside consultants to get to the bottom of the soft-tissue injury crisis that plagued the club during the 2014 season.
The Magpies have spent the past six weeks working with experts from the Australian Institute of Sport, American college basketball and soccer specialists, as well as fitness gurus from the National Hockey League to try to identify the reason behind the club's lengthy injury list.
Fitness boss Bill Davoren and club director Alisa Camplin – a gold medallist at the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics and the Australian Olympic Committee's chef de mission for the Winter Youth Olympic games – have played a major role in the club's internal overview of its fitness program.
Collingwood had 15 players on its injury list at the end of the season, with seven players suffering hamstring or groin ailments.
Jamie Elliott (hamstring), Alan Toovey (groin), Dane Swan (hamstring), Clinton Young (hamstring), Nathan Freeman (hamstring), Jonathon Marsh (hamstring) and Ben Reid (hamstring) were all listed as being hobbled by soft-tissue problems at the end of the season.
Magpies president Eddie McGuire said the club's fan forum at the MCG on Monday night was designed to explain to members why the club had encountered so many problems.
"We've been going through our own investigation. We've got outside experts in and we're working through some scenarios and we think we've come up with a couple of reasons why that might have happened," McGuire told reporters before the event started.
"Quite obviously it hasn't been done correctly. There might be an element of bad luck but that's always going to be."
Davoren explained the key philosophies behind the construction of his fitness program, with the Magpies identifying the need to elevate its players' fitness levels.
A focus on transition running is a key part of coach Nathan Buckley's coaching ethos, but the increased training loads have led to a definitive spike in soft-tissue injuries. There were 17 extra games missed with hamstring problems in 2014.
However as Davoren explained the number of games missed due to a wide-range of injuries actually decreased, with the figure sitting at 219 games in 2014.
That followed the elevated numbers of 251 games in 2013 and 244 in 2012.
Davoren also touched on:
· The need to further increase the club's fitness load to catch up with other clubs in the competition
· The club's decision to abandon its highly-successful overseas high-altitude program
· What the club was doing to prepare its players for the rigours of AFL football.
There were approximately 1000 fans who turned up at the MCG to listen to club figures assess the 2014 season, with some of the questions drawing some interesting and forthright responses.
